Aesthetic Experience (Greene's Account)

Greene drew on Dewey's account of Art as Experience (1934) to articulate a theory of aesthetic encounter as the primary instrument of education. An aesthetic experience is not the passive consumption of beauty; it is an active, effortful, transformative engagement with a work that resists easy assimilation. The encounter produces what Greene called, following Shklovsky, defamiliarization — the forced perception of what routine consciousness has rendered invisible. It cultivates specific capacities: perceptual sensitivity (the ability to distinguish what others collapse into single labels), tolerance for ambiguity (the capacity to remain in uncertainty without forcing resolution), creative courage (the willingness to act without guarantee), and empathic imagination (the construction of perspectives other than one's own). These are precisely the capacities the AI economy most urgently requires and that AI tools least reliably produce.